


proud of you, kid

by buckybear (eds_spagheds)



Series: one-shots that make endgame hurt more [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: (steve is just mentioned), Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Domestic Fluff, Family Feels, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Other, Parent Tony Stark, Precious Peter Parker, Protective Siblings, Protective Tony Stark, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, morgan stark deserves the world and peter parker is gonna give it to her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 20:05:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19383769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eds_spagheds/pseuds/buckybear
Summary: i've been wanting to write this ever since i saw endgame and i never finished it but i saw far from home last night and stayed up until 3am just to finish it yeehaw--you know that thing parents do with the airplane spoon when they feed their kids? yeah it's that but iron man





	proud of you, kid

**Author's Note:**

> (so this is basically just me fucking with the timeline so it makes sense, but basically this takes place in a post-endgame universe where the battle against thanos took place like less than two years after infinity war instead of five so morgan is like less than a year old also tony is alive because fuck marvel)

There are many moments in Tony Stark’s life that he would say made him proud.

He made it to MIT before most teenagers were even starting high school.

He worked his way out of a terrorist group’s torture cave with his own ingenuity.

He saved the entire city of New York from a nuke _and_ lived through flying into a wormhole with it.

He convinced the smartest woman he’d ever met that falling in love with him was a good idea.

He saved the whole world time and time again.

He found a true family full of people that loved him and that he loved in return.

He gave hope to a kid who really needed someone looking out for him.

He defended his mother’s memory when it truly mattered.

He helped his best friend walk again.

He proposed to the woman of his dreams and she said yes.

He went toe to toe with the most powerful being in the universe and made him bleed.

He invented _time travel_ in one night, for fuck's sake.

He saved the world and lived to see it.

But he wasn’t perfect.

Far from it.

There were so many things he wasn’t proud of.

He killed hundreds, maybe thousands before Stark Industries stopped manufacturing weapons.

He let Pepper fall.

He led an innocent kid from a small town that should've been safe to get roped up in a fight he did nothing to become a part of.

He dragged another kid into a fight that he caused, only to get him killed.

He let Rhodey fall.

He attacked Barnes for a horrific crime he never would’ve committed if he had a say in his own actions.

He took Peter’s suit away when he needed it most and nearly got a third kid killed.

He got on that spaceship knowing he might never get to say goodbye to Pepper.

He _lost_.

He lost his kid.

He gave up trying to fix the world.

He didn’t know what I did to deserve the life he ended up with.

Even before they fixed the snap, he was lucky. Of course, losing Peter was still probably the worst thing he’d ever been through in his life, but coming back to Earth and seeing that Rhodey, and Pepper, and Happy were all still alive...he knew he was lucky.

There was nothing, in his mind, that he’d ever done to deserve that luck, but he never wasted it.

He got a chance to fix his life and he really tried not to waste it.

He married Pepper as quickly as he could after the snap. It was a miracle they both survived as it was and he wasn’t going to waste a second not being married to her if there was anything that could take her away.

It took him a full week of being on Earth before he was able to go to the Parkers’ apartment to tell May what had happened. He found the woman curled up on the floor in her nephew’s room, his duvet around her shoulders. Tony didn’t even need to tell her Peter was gone, she could already feel it. The two just cried together and Tony promised her he’d find a way to bring everyone back, no matter what it took.

No one could track Thanos down. A year and three months after The Decimation on what would’ve been Peter’s eighteenth birthday, he figured out time travel. They had tried for months to find the stones, only to find out Thanos had destroyed them. Time travel was their only chance to reverse the snap.

Tony was growing desperate. The others were growing hopeless.

It was later that month that Pepper told him she was pregnant. If anyone asked, he wouldn’t be able to use any words in his extremely vast vocabulary to even begin to express how terrified he was.

He was about to go back in time to try to save the world from a titan who already killed half of it. He fucked up the first time. He lost his first kid and now Pepper thought he deserved to have a second chance at fatherhood? He was convinced he didn’t deserve it. That no child should ever be subjected to the curse that is Tony Stark. Not after what he let happen to Peter.

When they finally had every living Avenger gathered at the compound and the entire time heist prepared, it had been nearly six months. Some members were harder to track down than others. Some weren’t willing to risk what they hadn’t lost. The supplies needed to even execute it were incredibly hard to collect, but they did it. They were so close.

The rest of the process to reverse the snap was honestly a blur. He was only thinking about two things the entire time: getting his son back and making it home to Pepper.

Even when they assembled the stones into the gauntlet Tony had built, it didn’t seem like it was actually happening. He had a feeling, or maybe just an inclination to fear for the worst, but when Bruce was preparing to do the reversal snap, Tony asked that he snap away any trace of Thanos from any timeline.

No version of him would ever have to suffer through that in any universe.

It felt surreal to see Peter again when it was all over. He could barely even remember everything that came before the moment his kid was back in his arms, but he knew he never wanted to go back to a time without Peter Parker in the world.

He didn’t realize just how much he missed the kid’s smile until he told Peter about the baby and how he was going to be a big brother.

Watching Peter hold his daughter that early morning in the hospital was a dream he didn’t even realize he had until it came true. Both of his kids alive and safe and _perfect_.

Morgan was beautiful and she was just another example of something he felt he didn’t deserve. She was perfect in every way and he would’ve thought he was biased until he saw just how much Peter adored her.

May and Peter both spent more time at the compound after the snap than their apartment. May and Pepper became incredibly close with the older woman passing along all of the parenting advice she’d learned and showing her how to use all of the devices that made her life so much easier.

Besides, Peter was practically begging to babysit every time they went anywhere, so they never had to worry too much about childcare.

Tony never thought he’d be able to have a life so perfect. According to him, he’d done nothing to deserve such an intelligent and beautiful wife, such loyal friends, and the two most incredible kids he could’ve possibly hoped for.

Peter even volunteered to handle Morgan when she couldn’t sleep through the night. Aka, they both through the was an actual godsend.

Until Tony woke up early one morning, almost six months after she was born, to what he thought was Morgan crying and dragged himself into the main living space of the compound. He froze in his tracks the moment he saw what it really was.

Morgan was sitting in her high chair, the widest smile on her face that Tony had ever seen. She was laughing so hard it sounded like screaming and Tony couldn’t believe he ever thought she was crying with that grin.

Peter was sitting across from her on a barstool, a jar of baby food in his hand and a spoon in the other. His pajama pants with Thor’s hammer printed all over them never failed to make Tony chuckle and he could see globs of bright orange baby food covering the oversized tee shirt the boy wore. There were bags under the kid’s eyes and he hair looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, but there was joy in his eyes and a smile on the face that could almost rival Morgan’s.

“Morgan come on, you gotta’ stop moving for like...five seconds please,” Peter sighed, a fond smile nonetheless. “Look, okay? How about this.”

He scooped another spoonful of baby food and positioned it in front of Morgan’s smiling face.

“Ready? Here comes Iron Man,” he spoke in a high pitched voice he deserved only for Morgan. He made a whooshing sound with his mouth as he pretended to fly the spoon around in front of baby Morgan’s face, the girl clapping and laughing with delight. When Peter masterfully slipped the spoon into her mouth, she took it easily and the boy seemed to deflate with relief.

“Thank god,” he exhaled, digging out another spoonful. “How about your Uncle Rhodey, huh?”

Morgan clapped again.

“Nyoom,” he mimicked “Here comes _War Machine!”_

Tony had to clamp a hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing as he watched his kids that were more perfect in that moment than anything he could’ve imagined.

When Morgan made it through a few more spoonfuls hand-delivered by Iron Man and War Machine, she seemed to get a bit tired of the same trick over and over, which Peter definitely noticed.

Tony decided to take advantage of the situation in the only way he knew how: embarrassing his kid.

“I betcha’ Spiderman could swing her some breakfast. What do you think, Mor?” Tony spoke up from the doorway, making Peter jump in his seat and Morgan shriek with glee.

“Oh my god, Mr. Stark you scared the shit out of me,” Peter grumbled, wiping up the spilled baby food that resulted from Morgan excitedly banging her tiny fists on her high chair.

Tony chuckled, crossing the room to help the boy clean up the mess. “I never thought I’d have to tell _you_ to watch your language, bud.”

Peter gave Tony a look that basically said, “I’m so tired I can barely speak English, let alone filter myself,” which he definitely understood.

“How did you not know I was there?” He asked, ruffling Morgan’s hair and wiping some of the dripping food from her chin. “What happened to your whole ‘Peter Tingle’ thing?”

Peter groaned, leaning his head against the tray table attached to Morgan’s high chair.

“I get stupid when I’m tired, Mr. Stark.”

Tony couldn’t help but laugh at that as he took the reigns feeding Morgan her breakfast. “I don’t think you could be stupid if you tried, kid.”

“And all this time I thought you knew me,” Peter sighed dramatically,” Morgan giggling at the boy’s tone. “My _blood_ is literally dumb bitch juice.”

 _“Language,_ Parker,” Tony laughed. “Jesus, you’re making me sound like Cap.”

“Is that still a bad thing?” Peter asked innocently, genuinely curious. Tony had explained to him in vague detail what had happened between the first and last fights with Thanos, but some things he didn’t mention for a reason.

“No,” Tony admitted, scooping Morgan up out of her chair before passing her over into Peter’s arms. “Here, hold her for a second.”

“Did he at least apologize for Siberia?” Tony sighed, fishing a bottle of milk out of their refrigerator and warming it up slowly.

“Not I’m so many words,” he chuckled dryly. “He knows he went too far. I know I shouldn’t have blamed Barnes for what wasn’t his fault. We moved on for the sake of everyone else and we just put the past few years behind us.”

Peter but his lip, wanting to ask if Tony was actually telling him everything, but he knew he shouldn’t. If there was more to tell, he just had to trust that Tony would tell him at some point.

“Do the others know about Morgan?” At the mention of her name, Morgan grabbed onto Peter’s face, his nose in one hand and a fistful of hair in the other.

“To be honest, I think the best and worst part of the blip was when Morgan was born,” he spoke with a guilty tone, Peter crossed into the kitchen to prop himself and Morgan onto the counter beside where Tony was preparing a bottle for her. “That sounds horrible, I know, but as much as I couldn’t have been more thrilled about my new baby girl,” he smiled, kissing the top of Morgan’s head. “I kept feeling sick with guilt that you weren’t there.”

Peter felt his arms tighten around Morgan and he obediently followed as Tony waved him over to the sofa in the living room.

“It wasn’t your fault-“

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” he whined, clearly used to having heard the same false comfort over the past two years. “But that’s never enough. It’s never enough to just know I didn’t cause it because the part that hurts is that it happened and I couldn’t stop it. When I first held Morgan...god, all I could think about was her disappearing right there in my arms. Just fading away into nothing.” Peter couldn’t find the words to say, so he opted to just lean his head against the man’s shoulder, Morgan in his lap chugging a bottle of milk quite impressively.

“I didn’t really let anyone visit for a long time after she was born. I didn’t want them to think...fuck, kid, I didn’t want anyone to think that I had replaced you or moved on because I hadn’t and I know I never will and I just thought...” he trailed off. “I didn’t want them to doubt that you meant just as much to me as Morgan ever will. I wanted both of my kids back before they got to meet one of them.”

Peter smiled, running a hand through Morgan’s hair.

“Thanks, Mr. Stark,” he spoke carefully, trying to hide the tears in his eyes. “It...it means a lot that you didn’t give up on me. On...all of us.”

Tony huffed a smirk, slinging an arm around Peter’s shoulders as he took Morgan from the boy with his other arm. “Kiddo, it was only ever for you. No offense to the others, but I would’ve survived fine without them. You, not so much.”

Neither of them spoke after that, especially not when Morgan finished her bottle and realized Peter wasn’t holding her anymore, screaming and reaching out to her big brother. That was all Tony ever really wanted anyway.

Maybe he was selfish for hiding his kids away from the world, but at least he had a good reason. Peter could protect Morgan if he needed to and Pepper too in a worst-case scenario. His family was back together and as long as they stayed that way, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad when he eventually had to leave them all. Just maybe.

“Hey, Pete?” Tony spoke up, startling an exhausted Peter who had started to doze off on his shoulder.

Peter hummed in response as he sat up, blinking into awareness.

“Did that Iron Man spoon thing really work?” Peter chuckled and shrugged.

“I guess so,” he spoke sheepishly. “I mean it worked on me as a kid, so I figured I’d give it a shot.”

And that right there was what he was most proud of.

In a lifetime full of just about every mistake a man could possibly make, his two kids still loved him and that meant he had to be doing something right.

**Author's Note:**

> i wish!!! i could rant!! about what happened!!! in far from home!!! literally you guys are going to have a heart attack watching this movie like it will literally feel like you got hit by a bus;)
> 
> but thank you all for reading!! i hope you liked it! all kudos and comments are greatly appreciated and i would love to hear your feedback or what you want to see next:) also, feel free to check out the rest of this series or my peter/harley fic that's currently in-progress
> 
> xoxo, elle


End file.
